Unasked Questions About the War on Iran

The media ignore the evidence as they regurgitate the official narrative that manufactures consent for U.S.-led wars, writes Alison Broinowski.

Most of the Western media refuse to join the dots and explain Israel’s decades-long obsession with defanging Tehran.

The war in Iran is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has planned for four decades. He’s always wanted Israel to extend from Egypt to the Euphrates and in the process have the United States overthrow seven neighbouring countries, the last and latest being Iran.

That was also America’s plot, hatched by the neo-conservative authors at the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in 2000. The list of targeted countries, confirmed by U.S. General Wesley Clark in 2007, was based on a proposal  published in Israel in 1982. 

Ambitious as they were, these long-held intentions have now culminated in the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, which seems sudden but was carefully planned, a former British ambassador claims. U.S. President Donald Trump was not “bounced into it” by Israel: it had been in gestation for months, says Craig Murray, Britain’s ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004.

Well in advance, Trump had weapons ordered for fast delivery from Lockheed Martin, naval ships and troops were moved to the Gulf, and C.I.A. and in several cities Mossad agitators reportedly stirred up Iranians already exasperated by their theocratic rulers and by U.S. sanctions. 

If Murray is right, Trump and Netanyahu must have been planning this in their frequent meetings before and since the “12-day war” against Iran last year. Or for longer: Trump has reminded the world that as far back as 1987 he wanted the U.S. to take over some of Iran’s oil, and to go to war for it.  

But Trump’s shambolic war shows that he regards everything as a “deal,” and while aggrandising himself, he fails to understand that Iranians don’t accept transactionalism about their country, whoever its leader is.

He appears not to remember that under the shah, Iran was on good terms with Israel and the U.S., until the uprising against the Pahlavis in 1979. He doesn’t mention the C.I.A.’s overthrow in 1953 of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who merely wanted to nationalise Iran’s oil.

Instead of understanding Iran and its people, Trump claims to trust his “gut instinct” about the war, and he regularly gets it wrong. 

The state of the president’s mental, cognitive and physical health has been raised again lately by his niece Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist. She observes symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in Trump, and recalls that his father and her grandfather, Fred Trump Sr., died with dementia.

Other specialists detect signs of “malignant narcissism,” and note that the president’s repeated threats, exaggerations and reversals are more likely to be the results of incapacity than of intent. 

For Trump, as for Netanyahu, the personal is paramount. Both of them face coming elections (Trump has to face the mid-terms in November while Netanyahu has a general election before the end of the year); both want to stay alive and out of jail; and the continuing war further enriches them, their families and friends. 

Netanyahu’s project ultimately derives from the 1982 Yinon Plan, named after its author, an Israeli diplomat, journalist, and former adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.  It advocated for Israel to fragment surrounding Arab states along sectarian and ethnic lines (such as breaking up Syria, Iraq and Lebanon) so that Israel could achieve long-term dominance of the Middle East, essentially the Greater Israel Project. It was published in the Hebrew journal Kivunim (“Directions”) as “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s.”

Some of those ideas were built on in a 1996 policy paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” prepared for Netanyahu by American neoconservative strategists. The document argued that Israel should abandon land-for-peace diplomacy and instead pursue a strategy that would weaken or remove hostile regimes in the region, particularly Iraq and Syria. The goal was not mere military victory but a geopolitical restructuring of the Middle East in Israel’s favour.

In 1997 some of the same people involved with that report established the Project for the New American Century think tank, which produced several major reports, especially “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” in the year 2000. It argued for preserving U.S. military preeminence in the Middle East and two other theaters with a “revolution in military affairs” that might be accelerated by a “catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Just a year later, such an event occurred — 9/11 — leading Congress to quickly pass the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists and the anti-terrorism PATRIOT Act.

Tracking the planning process forward to 2001, a former C.I.A. officer confirms what many conspiracy analysts have suspected for years: that Israel, together with Saudi Arabia, was potentially informed about conspirators in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 before they occurred.

John Kiriakou, a former chief of C.I.A. counter-terrorist operations in Pakistan, points to the involvement of the Saudi royal family in Al-Qaeda’s plan. As well, Kiriakou says that Mossad was thick on the ground on the U.S. east coast in 2001 and Israel knew what was to happen, but did nothing to stop it. 

It produced three sudden deaths in a week in July 2022: Princes Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz (in hospital after an operation), Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki (in a car accident) and Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir (of thirst in the desert). The latter two were both in their mid-20s, while Ahmed was 43.

Seven months later Mushaf Ali Mir, Pakistan’s air marshal, died in a plane crash in clear weather over the unruly North-West Frontier province, along with his wife and closest confidants. 

9/11 researchers have found out a lot more about what two U.S. “allies,” Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, knew in advance of 9/11 and did in support of Al-Qaeda.

U.S. lawyer Gerald Posner’s account is based on Al-Qaeda operative Ali Zubaydah’s claims about his capture and interrogation, and his admissions about his work with Saudi and Pakistani officials. From Guantánamo Bay, where he has been held without charge for more than two decades, he told Posner that both Prince Ahmed and Mushaf Ali Mir, Pakistan’s air marshal, “knew that an attack was scheduled for American soil on that day.” Like Israelis, they did nothing to stop it. 

The Report of the 9/11 Commission, which some said was “set up to fail,” read more as a call to arms against Al-Qaeda than a forensic criminal report. 

The George W. Bush, Obama and Biden administrations prevented the U.S. Congress from accessing 28 pages from the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after 9/11.

Eventually released by Biden in June 2016, the pages identified Saudi Arabian diplomats, officials, and members of the ruling family as contributors to preparations for the attacks, but not Israelis.

Yet when U.S. President George W. Bush declared “war on terror” in response to 9/11, he realised Netanyahu’s aim for the U.S. to attack Israel’s neighbours. And war, says Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, “is always the first option, not the last one in Israel.”

A majority of those polled by The New York Times in the five years after the attacks on the Twin Towers and Washington thought the government was lying or was hiding something.  Even some staff, investigators, and members of the 9/11 Commission knew that senior military officials and C.I.A. Director George Tenet had lied to them, while others’ evidence was suppressed. But their knowledge was excluded from the final report.

This history reveals the need to be sceptical of Washington’s claims about terrorism from 9/11 to today’s war against Iran. “Terror” is repeatedly used as propaganda to manufacture consent for war and to demonise enemies of the West, while what the U.S. and Israel do is not terrorism.

—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a war crime, said NATO and its friends: yet the U.S. coalition’s long wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Somalia and Syria were not.

—Russia’s annexation of Crimea, its former territory, was an outrageous land grab: Israel’s annexations of Syria’s Golan and the Palestinians’ West Bank territory were not.

—Hamas’ breakout from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023, was terrorism; Israel’s recurrent attacks on Palestinians since 1948 and its ethnic cleansing of Gaza since 2023 were not. 

—Hamas and Hezbollah’s retaliation and the Houthis’ attacks are terrorism: Israel’s bombing and occupation of Gaza and southern Lebanon are not.

—Iran’s leaders are murderous tyrants: Israel’s indicted war criminals Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are not.

—Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s IRGC are designated terrorist organisations: the IDF, C.I.A. and Mossad are not.

The U.S. assaults on Venezuela and Iran, to be followed by Cuba, are claimed to be against terrorism or drugs: in fact they are about who controls oil and makes and unmakes governments.

It does not occur to most Americans and Israelis that their own activities are state terror. Instead, they claim a right to defend U.S. hegemony and all Jews’ right to Eretz Israel and greatness as “God’s chosen people.” Palestinians who resist have no such rights and are called subhuman terrorists, and under a new law, Arab Israelis will be executed for terrorism, while Jewish Israelis are not.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis made similar claims about the superiority of their civilisation to justify the Holocaust. No wonder some now detect a resurgence of fascism in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere. Others observe the sudden rise of anti-Semitism since October 2023. A growing number expect the U.S. war to fail, leaving Israel to do its worst in Iran and Lebanon.

Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis have been added to Al-Qaeda on the list of designated terrorists. The wars that followed culminate in Iran, labelled by Trump a “terrorist regime.” Candidate Trump took Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s advice to “move fast and break things.” He has done it as president. What ends up broken is now the whole world’s concern.

Dr Alison Broinowski AM is an Australian former diplomat, academic and author. Her books and articles concern Australia’s interactions with the world. She is president of Australians for War Powers Reform.